Eva Kolmer (Wolloch, Schmidt-Kolmer)

Eva Aglaja Irene KOLMER (divorced WOLLOCH, remarried SCHMIDT-KOLMER), born on June 25^th, 1913 in Vienna/Austro-Hungarian Empire (entitled residency ("heimatberechtigt") for Vienna/Austria, citizenship 1938: Austria), daughter of extraordinary prof. Dr. Walter Kolmer (1879–1931, zoologist, histologist) and Elisabeth Kolmer, née Perger/Pereles (1887–1942), lived in Vienna's 19^th district, Hasenauerstrasse 16. She had attended the Gymnasium in Vienna's 19^th district (Doebling), but dropped out of school early and began to work in a light bulb factory or as a scientific assistant in the bacteriological laboratory of the Vienna University Institute for Experimental Pathology, and passed her school leaving exams ("Matura") only in 1931 as an external student and then began to study medicine as a working student at the University of Vienna from the fall term of 1931/32 – with some interruptions. Her scientific work in the field of cancer research was financed by the British "Pearson Research Foundation" and Prof. Freund warned her against further illegal political activity, as both her scientific achievements and study successes suffered from it, as well as her employment and thus her study financing were endangered, but also the financing of the institute, which was fundamentally dependent on research financing by the foundation. She had to end her research work prematurely after her continued political work became known, but was able to continue her studies at the Medical Faculty (5^th year) until the fall term of 1937/38.

She was forced under National Socialism after the "Anschluss" for racist and political reasons to abandon her almost completed studies and leave the University of Vienna.

Both parents were considered Jews during the Nazi era. Her father, who died in 1931, had already changed his surname from "Kohn" to "Kolmer" in 1896 before he began his university studies (her mother had changed hers from "Pereles" to "Perger" in 1891) and had left the Jewish Community in 1905, i.e. years before her birth, and converted to the Protestant-Helvetic confession (as had her mother before her marriage in 1912). Eva Kolmer, although Protestant since birth, was persecuted as a Jew during National Socialism for racist reasons. But she was also persecuted for political reasons, as she had been active in the Social Democratic youth movement (Rote Falken, VSStOe, SAJDOe) since 1926, or had been a member of the Communist Party of Austria (KPOe) since 1930, and remained so even after it was banned under Austrofascism from 1933. She was arrested in August 1934, but could not be convicted in court for lack of concrete evidence, but was punished without trial with six weeks of police custody and three months in a detention camp. She was not expelled from the university and was able to continue her studies under Austrofascism until the Anschluss and continued to be politically active in the underground against Austrofascism and National Socialism.

She left Vienna as early as March 16^th, 1938, and emigrated via Zurich/Switzerland and Paris/France to Great Britain, arriving in London on March 24^th, 1938. She worked again as a laboratory assistant at the Pearson Foundation, but was soon dismissed again for political reasons.
Two of her siblings were able to emigrate to Australia in time; her mother Lili Kolmer was deported from her flat in Vienna's 1^st district, Koellnerhofgasse 7, to Maly Trostinec [Малы Трасцянец/Belarus] near Minsk on August 17^th, 1942, and murdered there on August 21^th, 1942.
Eva Kolmer or Wolloch – she had married in her first marriage in 1939 in Battersea/London the childhood friend Dipl.Ing. Jakob Wolloch (1912–1996), who had also emigrated from Vienna – was an active member of the Austrian Communist Party (KPOe) in Great Britain, from September 1938 member and secretary of the newly founded non-party aid organization Council of Austrians in Great Britain, member and from 1939 secretary general of the Austrian refugee organization "Austrian Centre" and at the end of 1941 co-founder and secretary general of the "Free Austrian Movement". She was a staff member of Oesterreichische Nachrichten and Zeitspiegel and was instrumental in concretizing the Popular Front policy of the Austrian Communists in Great Britain. In 1944 she was co-founder and secretary of the Free Austrian World Movement as the London umbrella organization for the Free Austrian Movements around the world. While she herself was exempted from internment as an "enemy alien," her husband was interned, their marriage broke up after his release after a year and a half, and she lived in London with the East German writer and journalist Heinz Schmidt (1906–1989) from 1941.

Eva Wolloch, or Kolmer, returned to Austria in December 1945, where she was scheduled to become a secretary for the communist National Council faction and finish her medical studies and work as a doctor. Her partner, however, had already left for Germany in the Soviet occupation zone (later the GDR) in 1946, and via a detour of several months via London she also moved there, where they also married in 1947 and had two children (Renate, 1947, and Walter, 1950). Despite some internal party problems and a transfer to Schwerin, Eva Schmidt-Kolmer became head of the mother-child health protection department in the Ministry of Health of Mecklenburg in the GDR and was able to complete her studies at the university there on July 11^th, 1952 and graduate to "M.D." (dissertation: Health Protection for Mother and Child) and work as a physician. She specialized in pediatrics and became a specialist in social hygiene, 1954–1956 assistant at the Institute for Social Hygiene at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig. She moved to Berlin in 1956 where she worked at the Institute of Social Hygiene at the Humboldt University in Berlin from 1956–1965 and also habilitated in 1957 and quickly obtained a professorship. She was director of the GDR Central Institute for Hygiene of Childhood and Adolescence in Berlin from 1966–1974, with which she remained closely associated after her retirement until its forced closure in 1990.
She was a member of the SED and a council member of the International Democratic Women's Federation. In 1963 she was awarded the Fatherland Order of Merit in Gold and the Great Star of Friendship between Nations, in 1973 the Banner of Labor and in 1983 the Fatherland Order of Merit in Gold.

She wrote, among other works, under the pseudonym Mitzi Hartmann, Austria still lives (London 1938); Help for Austrians in Liberated Europe, in Report of the Conference on Austrian Refugee Questions of the Free Austrian Movement, 17 Sept. 1944 (London 1944); and The Austrian Centre. 7 Jahre österreichische Gemeinschaftsarbeit (London 1945) or as Eva Schmidt-Kolmer on numerous medical and social-hygienic topics, including Die Pflege und Erziehung unserer Kinder in Krippen und Heimen. Volk u. Gesundheit (1956), Pädagogische Aufgaben und Arbeitsweise der Krippen. Volk u. Gesundheit VEB (Berlin, 1970), Verhalten und Entwicklung des Kleinkindes, Akademie-Verlag (Berlin 1959), Pädagogik (Krippenpädagogik), VEB Volk und Gesundheit (Berlin 1983), Frühe Kindheit. Beiträge zur Psychologie, Volk und Wissen (Berlin 1984) and Bewegungserziehung, Bildnerische Erziehung, Musikerziehung. Lehrbuch für Fachschulausbildung (Krippenpädagogik) VEB Verlag Volk und Gesundheit (Berlin 1989).

Prof. Dr. Eva Schmidt-Kolmer, née. Kolmer, divorced Wolloch, died on August 29^th, 1991 in Berlin, Germany.

Lit.: Archive of the University of Vienna/enrollment forms ("Nationale") MED 1931–1938; Helene MAIMANN, Politik im Wartesaal. Österreichische Exilpolitik in Großbritannien 1938–1945, Vienna/Cologne/Graz, 1975, 76; RÖDER 1980, 383; DÖW, ed., Österreicher im Exil. 1934–1945. Eine Dokumentation. Großbritannien 1938–1945, Vienna, 1992; W MUCHITSCH, Mit Spaten, Waffen und Worten. Die Einbindung österreichischer Flüchtlinge in die britischen Kriegsanstrengungen 1939–1945, Vienna/Zurich 1992; Charmian BRINSON, Eva Kolmer and the Austrian emigration in Britain, 1938–1946, in: Antony Grenville, ed., German-speaking Exils in Great Britain. The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, Vol. 2. Amsterdam/GA 2000, 143–169; Gabriele ARNDT, Leben und wissenschaftliches Werk Eva Schmidt-Kolmers, unprinted med. diss. Univ. Greifswald, Greifswald, 2002;  BRANDSTETTER 2007, 141; POSCH/INGRISCH/DRESSEL 2008, 419, 468; Ilse KOROTIN & Nastasja STUPNICKI, eds., Biografien bedeutender österreichischer Wissenschafterinnen, Wien, Köln u. Weimar 2018, 497–499; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Schmidt-Kolmer.

Herbert Posch